Jeremy Allen White in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE
It's hard to be dismissive toward any movie that inspires you to pick up a book, and having seen Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, I'm now eager to read Warren Zanes' 2023 nonfiction that inspired the release, and maybe the Boss' 2016 memoir Born to Run, too. But I'd argue that your desire to check out those titles has little to do with the quality of writer/director Scott Cooper's bio-musical drama. You aren't inclined to turn toward the page because the film is so great that you want its magic expanded, or so bad that you need its material redeemed. Reading Zanes' and Bruce's accounts, however, might be the only way to truly understand Cooper's movie, at least in terms of its hero's strangely unexplored psychology. Deliver Me from Nowhere is chiefly about the birth of Springsteen's 1982 album Nebraska, and I was fascinated with the “how” behind its creation. Sadly, though, I was given little reason to care about the “why.”
Because Nebraska is such a moody, introspective work – as we're shown, not at all what Columbia Records executives were hoping for or wanting after the 1980 triumph of The River – Deliver Me from Nowhere almost had no choice but to be similarly downbeat … which might not be what fans of Springsteen's rock are hoping for or wanting, either. Presumably knowing this, Cooper opens his film on the final night of Bruce's 1981 concert tour, starting things off with a bang, as well as a banger: lead Jeremy Allen White going to town on an explosive, deeply sweaty rendition of “Born to Run.” It's a canny way to provide excitement and rooting interest from the get-go, as well as a smart choice for anyone wondering whether the sad-eyed star of The Bear has what it takes to believably channel Bruce. Does he ever. White doesn't resemble Springsteen (although the actor's brown contact lenses do at least make him look less like Jeremy Allen White), yet he absolutely nails the Boss' untamed concert persona, and as the movie progresses, his vocals prove eerily accurate on both belted anthems and quieter, more reflective compositions. When we eventually hear the song halfway through Cooper's film, it was only the occasionally unfamiliar phrasing that made me realize it was White crooning “I'm on Fire” and not Springsteen himself.
With his haunted expressions and tentative, almost apologetic demeanor, though, White is inherently affecting even when his role doesn't require him to sing or say a thing. Or rather, he would be if Cooper's script weren't so fuzzy on the source of Bruce's personal anguish. In interviews and his Springsteen on Broadway concert event for Netflix, the artist has been remarkably candid about his emotional struggles and lapses into darkness. But it's notoriously difficult to make depression cinematic, and despite the frequently employed black-and-white flashbacks to his youth spent with a domineering, brutal father (Stephen Graham) and victimized mother (Gaby Hoffman), it's evident that there's more to Springsteen's turmoil than the overworked crummy-childhood trope. But what?
Sequestered in a rented New Jersey house while working on songs that would lead to Nebraska (and 1984's Born in the U.S.A.), Bruce becomes obsessed with the sociopathic loners of Terrence Malick's Badlands, particularly Martin Sheen's Charles Starkweather surrogate, appearing to feel increasingly cut off from his Jersey roots and acquaintances, and growing increasingly hesitant about his romantic relationship with single mom Faye (a composite figure charmingly played by Odessa Young). Yet because Springsteen is unable to articulate his pain outside of his lyrics, and has no one he feels he can share it with anyway, his misery starts to seem uncomfortably, and unfortunately, generic. Even though there's way too much of the made-up Faye in Cooper's movie, you empathize with her frustration in Bruce's refusal to open up, and also understand the discouragement of the musician's manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), who certainly comes off like the sort of endlessly supportive friend you could tell anything to. It's far too convenient for all of Springsteen's problems to stem from his childhood under a mentally unstable dad. Yet that's the only explanation Deliver Me from Nowhere gives us, and I was never more angry with the movie than when Bruce, near the finale, agreed to a therapy session: The psychologist asked why he was there, and Springsteen broke down in tears, promptly ending the scene. We finally have the chance to hear the man verbalize his long-gestating torment, and the door gets slammed in our face.
You could argue, of course, that Bruce outright stating his pain would be redundant – that everything we need to know can be found in the Nebraska lyrics. That's why it's maddening to get so few of them. There are a bunch of excellent sequences here involving the work behind the album: Springsteen and his engineer Mike (an underused yet most welcome Paul Walter Hauser) recording lo-fi tracks with a DIY bedroom setup; Bruce changing the “he” to an “I” when writing about a killer; the musician arguing for the preservation of his home tapes' original sound without studio augmentation. Oddly, though, we generally only hear snippets of the songs themselves, and the one time in which it looks like we might experience a Nebraska number from beginning to end, the Columbia executive (a smarm-oozing David Krumholtz) listening to it turns the song off after 20 seconds. Ironically, or maybe not at all, we're treated to more full-length tunes that aren't on Bruce's sixth album, as “Born to Run,” “I'm on Fire,” and “Born in the U.S.A.” get performed in their entirety while “Atlantic City,” “State Trooper,” and others are merely hinted at. Cooper's movie almost seems to be hiding the fact that it's fundamentally about Nebraska.
If you're a fellow Springsteen devotee, Deliver Me from Nowhere is an awfully hard film to dislike; its heart is in the right place, and White and Strong, despite the latter stuck with too much awkward expository dialogue, are clearly giving their all. But there's too little drama behind Nebraska's release – it's obviously going into the world the way Bruce wants whether Columbia likes it or not – and far too little drama to the artist's struggles with inchoate feelings he's loath to express or admit. I left the film knowing more about the recording process, for which I'm grateful. Unfortunately, I also left knowing no more about Bruce Springsteen himself than I did before I entered. The movie's an honorable attempt. It just isn't Boss enough.
A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE
As directed by Kathryn Bigelow, Netflix's newly streaming A House of Dynamite is a phenomenal 40-minute short film that goes on for another 80 minutes. The time isn't necessarily wasted, mind you; Bigelow directs with her customary electricity and verve, and there are a whole bunch of intriguing actors, most of them employed admittedly sparingly, to keep you hoping for the best. But this pre-apocalyptic thriller is still a deliberately redundant movie, telling of the same horrifyingly brief incident from a number of varying perspectives, and that makes its rather glaring deficiencies – particularly screenwriter Noah Oppenheim's unsubtle points about governmental hubris – feel mighty redundant, too.
The film's central conceit is simple and elegant: Someone, from somewhere overseas, has launched a ballistic missile, and there are about 19 minutes left until it hits Chicago, killing an estimated 10 million people, with many millions more sure to die from the impact's lingering effects. No one knows who fired the weapon or why – every country questioned about the event denies involvement – and attempts at destroying the missile mid-air prove futile. What, A House of Dynamite asks, and with the clock ticking, do we do now?
Classic-movie fans will no doubt remember much the same scenario playing out in Sidney Lumet's 1964 Cold War thriller Fail-Safe, which still stands as one of the most propulsive, terrifying “What if?” entertainments of the nuclear age. Despite Bigelow's prowess and composer Volker Bertelmann's traditionally bombastic score, A House of Dynamite isn't that scary. This is partly due to the narrative's resetting-the-clock presentation, which begins to feel familiar all too early. Bigelow's latest is roughly divided into three sections, with the impending attack first confronted by a military-defense station in Alaska and the White House Situation Room, then by the leaders at U.S. Strategic Command, then, finally, by the U.S. president and his secretary of defense. Yet beyond repeating the same inciting event, these scenes, following the comparative novelty of the opener and to their eventual detriment, unfortunately repeat the same scripted structure.
At first, with each segment, there's a bit of human dilemma: Rebecca Ferguson's White House senior officer has a kid at home with a 102-degree fever; Idris Elba's president subjects himself to photo-op nonsense while his wife (Renée Elise Goldsberry) treks through Africa; Tracy Letts' strategic-command general wants to know what everyone thought of last night's ballgame. Then the threat of nuclear annihilation arrives, and everyone goes into crisis mode, the actors spouting incomprehensible (for a civilian) jargon while furiously typing away at keyboards in hope of preventing the attack. And then, when the typing proves useless, everyone starts throwing up their hands at the ridiculousness of their plight. “So this is a f---ing coin toss?” brays Jared Harris' secretary of defense. “This is what we get for 50 billion dollars?!” Elba's president puts it more succinctly, saying, “This is insanity.” “No sir,” he's told by the voice on the other end of the phone. “This is reality.” This is also lazy, obvious, pandering screenwriting.
Barring exceptions such as Near Dark, Zero Dark Thirty, and, of course, her Oscars juggernaut The Hurt Locker, Bigelow, over the course of her career, has been routinely required to make lackluster scripts appear credible. And what works in her first movie since 2017's Detroit – the vigorous pacing, the overlapping conversation, the occasionally memorable imagery – is all testament to Bigelow's talent. (Days after seeing the film, I'm still haunted by our last image of Jared Harris' defense secretary.) Yet given the Oppenheim script she had to work with, Bigelow and her cast can't give dimension to characters that offer mere wisps of personality, which is especially disappointing considering the caliber of ability on display, the thus-far-unmentioned talents including Greta Lee, Jason Clarke, Moses Ingram, Kaitlyn Dever, Gabriel Basso, Brittany O'Grady, a first-rate Jonah Hauer-King, and Willa Fitzgerald, the breakout star of last year's Strange Darling who definitely deserved more to do. (She's also in the next feature reviewed, and deserved more to do in that, as well.) Bigelow also can't do anything to make the movie's ending satisfying, and if A House of Dynamite ultimately angers viewers the way I expect it will, its non-finale finale will likely be the primary target of their wrath. Fail-Safe left us with “What happens next?” questions, too, but at least it didn't leave us with “What's happening now?!”
REGRETTING YOU
Last summer, I found the film version of novelist Colleen Hoover's largely silly romantic melodrama It Ends with Us redeemed by unexpectedly strong performances. Director Josh Boone's Regretting You, another title from the Hoover oeuvre, is like It Ends with Us without the unexpectedly strong performances. Its portrayals are, however, unexpected, because in a million years, I never imagined big-screen hooey of this sort vast enough to encompass Allison Williams turning her every minute on-screen into camp, Dave Franco suggesting a subtextual “Lemme outta here!” with each indifferent line reading, and Mckenna Grace apparently angling for a lifetime of discontinued Soap Opera Digest Awards. As adapted by screenwriter Susan McMartin, the movie is terrible, so relentless about not staying sad (or happy) for too long that it comes off as rather deranged. Yet what, precisely, was Boone thinking in regard to these hopelessly ill-matched feats of too-much or not-enough acting? That one of his three leads' disparate styles, none of which seem appropriate for the material, would prove so powerful that the other two would be viewed as complementary via incongruity?
In Hoover's conceit that even Nicholas Sparks would likely deem a bit much, Williams and Franco play Morgan and Jonah, former teen soulmates who dated the wrong people. Morgan wound up pregnant at 18 and irrevocably linked with baby daddy Chris (Scott Eastwood, a veteran of Spark's The Longest Ride adaptation). Jonah, meanwhile, hooked up with Morgan's sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald), and subsequently vanished from their North Carolina environs after Morgan proved unavailable for life. Now it's 17 years later, Morgan's and Chris' daughter Clara (Grace) is about to graduate high school, and Jonah is back with Jenny, and with a newborn to prove it. All would be hunky-dory except for the traffic accident that takes the lives of Chris and Jenny, leaving their significant others to pick up the pieces and face the newfound fact of their partners' longtime affair. Clara, though, remains in the dark about the adulterous relationship, believing herself responsible for killing her aunt through some ill-timed text messaging.
Can we stop for a second? Because this detail about the texting really irked me. The whole story, the whole movie, is based on the aftermath of Chris' and Jenny's affair: the depression and anger felt by Morgan and Jonah; the truth of that relationship opening the door to Morgan's and Jonah's potential romance; and principally the guilt Clara feels for unwittingly ending her beloved aunt's life. At no point, however, is there any exploration into what Clara thought happened when Aunt Jenny and her dad died in car accidents on the same day. Did the girl not ask, and was she not told, whether her dad and auntie were in a car together when they died? (Because that would be a crazy coincidence if they weren't.) Did she not ask why they were together in a car in the middle of a work day? Did she not ask whether it was Jenny who was driving? McMartin's script, as maybe Hoover's novel does, completely sidesteps the issues of what Grace knew, or even assumed, for the sake of a near-climactic tearjerker scene in which Mom has to tell her kid that Dad and Aunt Jenny weren't the heroes she thought they were. But it also robs Clara of independent thought, leading to Grace sobbing her eyes out, repeatedly, over plot points that should reasonably have been sorted out well before the funerals.
Then again, “reasonably” doesn't appear to be anywhere within this film's presentational vocabulary, given that nothing about Boone's film seems reasonable. Not the scenes of meant-to-be-heart-wrenching anguish positioned alongside scenes of goofy sitcom contrivance. Not Williams' continually (weirdly) arched eyebrows battling Franco's blandly (understandably) furrowed ones. Not the torturous histrionics of Grace when meshed with Mason Thames' über-chill as the occasionally unavailable boy Clara likes. Not the prelude and occasional flashbacks hoping to convince us that Williams, Franco, Eastwood, and Fitzgerald are 17. Not the lowbrow comic support provided by Sam Morelos as Clara's bestie and the severely overqualified Clancy Brown as Cute Boy's lovable Gramps. And definitely not the incessant, risible product-placement advertisements for Starry soda and, in particular, AMC theatres. It's at one of those venues that Thames' character works as an usher, and the only thing that would've made the two hours of Regretting You's treacle worthwhile for me would've been if, during his and Clara's romantic clinch in the lobby, the teens would've been smacked in the head by Nicole Kidman, late on her way to yet another private screening.
SHELBY OAKS
To the probable relief of many of you, I don't have much to say about writer/director Chris Stuckmann's largely Kickstarter-funded horror flick Shelby Oaks, which concerns the missing host of a Ghost Hunters-type YouTube sensation and her sister's dogged attempts to find her. Its first 20 minutes, all before the title is revealed in the delayed opening credits, are primarily “found footage”-based in the manner of The Blair Witch Project, there are subsequent visits to a haunted amusement park and a dank abandoned prison and cabins in the woods, and all of it climaxes with occult-minded, supernatural mumbo-jumbo I couldn't begin to explain, let alone understand. The movie was also vexing for so many of the intended deep scares coming from shadowy figures in dark backgrounds, and whether it was the fault of the movie's projection or my own eyesight, I'm not sure, but I barely registered any of them. Professionally assembled but resoundingly meh, Shelby Oaks didn't do much for me. But it was, at least, a wonderful reminder of the perks that superior actors can bring to a sub-optimal project.
To be honest, the actors don't even have to be all that superior if their mere presences inspire distinct echoes, and my guard was up at Stuckmann's movie the moment it introduced Brendan Sexton III as our heroine's husband Robert. Sexton is now decades older, but no less unsettling, than when playing savage 1990s creeps in Welcome to the Dollhouse and Boys Don't Cry. (I've subsequently seen Sexton in Seven Psychopaths, Don't Breathe 2, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, but to me, he'll always be the teen torturer of Heather Matarazzo and Hilary Swank.) That wonderfully irrepressible talent Robin Bartlett – such a lithe, nimble comic in the '90s, so memorable in the more recent Shutter Island and Inside Llewyn Davis – has what will likely, thanks to Weapons, forevermore be referred to as “the Amy Madigan role,” all obtrusive makeup and unsettling comedy and gruesome insinuation. Character-actor great Keith David, who seems to have barely aged over the last 40-plus years, shows up for one scene as that aforementioned prison's former warden and instantly conjures the idea of a Shelby Oaks prequel you'd prefer to see over this thing.
And our lead Mia, sister to Sarah Dunn's missing ghost hunter Riley, is played by Camille Sullivan, a Canadian performer who's new to me, but whom I hope won't be collectively new to us much longer. With her large, imploring eyes, and her face and forcefulness reminiscent of Christine Lahti's in the '80s and '90s, Sullivan is the best thing that could've happened to a middling, mood-heavy horror trifle. She brings legitimate gravitas to even the most senseless situations, and when delineating Mia's preposterous supernatural theory about Riley's disappearance to Robert, Sullivan delivers her claim with so much grounded passion and level-headed conviction that it's actually Mia's husband who seems crazy for not believing her. I'd say that Shelby Oaks will soon be forgotten, but in years to come, I may very well remember it as the movie that introduced me to Camille Sullivan.
BLUE MOON
You might need to be a specific type of viewer to get even a modicum of pleasure from director Richard Linklater's latest. Happily, though, I am that specific type, and Linklater's and screenwriter Robert Kaplow's biographical comedy Blue Moon is easily the most fun I've had at the movies since One Battle After Another, even though the works are so stylistically disparate as to be different artistic species.
The P.T. Anderson is expansive, bold, and thunderously ambitious. The Linklater is compact, simple, and evidently content to stay in its narrow presentational lane. Yet at literally no point during the film's 100-minute running length did I stop smiling. There's a scene here in which our protagonist, iconic lyricist and world-class smart-ass Lorenz Hart, meets 13-year-old whippersnapper Stephen Sondheim. The kid is introduced by an acquaintance as “a walking encyclopedia of musical theatre.” Hart, unimpressed, counters that he himself is known as “the walking pneumonia of musical theatre.” If you don't instantly recognize the myriad ways in which that encounter and exchange are simultaneously flabbergasting and hysterical, Blue Moon will not be the movie for you.
It also won't be for those who hate when movies are nearly indistinguishable from plays, and this one is perhaps the stagiest big-screen entertainment not based on a theatre piece since Fran Kranz's 2021 Mass: one set (not counting an alleyway prologue), only a dozen-or-so speaking roles, the whole shebang taking place in real time with a lo-o-o-ot of dialogue. As with Mass, I thought I'd died and gone to Heaven. Following the opener that reveals how the lonely, alcoholic Hart wasn't long for this world (he died at age 48), Linklater's film whisks us back in time eight months to the Manhattan nightclub Sardi's on the night of March 31, 1943. As Sondheim himself would've no doubt recalled, this was when Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! began its legendary Broadway run, and Richard Rodgers' longtime songwriting partner Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) isn't having it.
After making his escape from the St. James prior to the curtain call, Hart ducks into Sardi's – closed to the public as the site of the debuting musical's opening-night party – and begins spewing venom on all things Oklahoma! to his trusted sounding board, bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale). If you detest that particular Rodgers and Hammerstein the way many people I know do, and even if you don't (I happen to love it), you'll likely be in stitches at Hart's extended rant about how Rodgers “deserted” Hart to make middlebrow garbage with that talentless hack Oscar Hammerstein III, a show whose innocuousness guarantees that it'll be eventually be performed “in every high school in the country.” (One point for Hart's prophetic gifts.)
But Hart eventually moves on, grinding axes about love and career and assumptions about his sexuality – he claims to be “ambisexual,” though no one seems to be buying it – to a captive audience that includes piano-playing G.I. Morty Rifkin (Jonah Lee) and, incredibly, author E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), who happened to stop in for a drink and needs a little inspiration for his latest children's book. Then the Oklahoma! brigade enters and Blue Moon really goes to town, Hart now forced to fawn over this show he loathes with Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and Hammerstein (Simon Delaney), and hopefully seduce the girl he's had his eye on: 20-year-old college student Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), who clearly recognizes Hart's sexual leanings but is nonetheless delighted to bask in his affection.
Between the inside-baseball of the theatre and literary references, the enticing blend of truthfulness and artificiality inherent in the real-time format, and Hart being a master wordsmith (he wrote more than 1,000 songs!) whose conversation was bound to supply quotes for days, there was probably no way I wasn't going to love Blue Moon. It being helmed by perhaps my favorite living American director was “merely” a bonus. But I honestly didn't expect to adore Ethan Hawke as much as I did, let alone find his my absolute favorite film performance (to date) of 2025.
Hart, in the year of his death, being a balding, pudgy, four-foot-10 barfly with an eye for the gentlemen, Hawke is hardly the first actor you'd think of for the role. But some solid, generally subtle makeup effects and a few exquisite bits of compositional trickery convince you of this Hart's look and height. Hawke's acting genius takes care of the rest. While hilarious when rampaging through the superbly constructed monologues and punchlines Kaplow provides him, Linklater mainstay Hawke never loses touch with Hart's sad soulfulness – his notion of himself as a delightful raconteur and bon vivant who thinks his act is fooling everybody, not realizing it isn't fooling anybody. This Hart is desperate and pathetic, yet so helpless in his need for affirmation, and so very funny, that you have little choice but to love him, and Hawke's openhearted acceptance of all of Hart's gifts and foibles lends his portrayal a definitive grandeur. Even playing four-foot-10, it's the most towering screen work of Ethan Hawke's career.
In the manner of most plays (or movie-plays) boasting a primary figure, Hart is given a series of one-on-ones with characters who enter his periphery and ultimately escape it, and every last one of them is a thrill. Blessedly, the ideally cast Cannavale is around consistently, Eddie's seen-and-heard-it-all acceptance, and talent for delivering perfect and riotous rejoinders, making him a perfect landing spot for Hart's caustic wit. Kennedy, though, is the precisely rendered image of E.B. White we've maybe all had in our heads. Scott is exceptional as Rodgers, his first encounter with Hart brimming with surface politeness and unhidden nerves over the impending reviews, his post-reviews demeanor significantly more honest and brutal, yet still fiercely patient and loving.
And even though Qualley has been around long enough, in roles more than adult enough, to not to be remotely persuasive as a starry-eyed 20-year-old, she holds you in a grasp as sure as the one Hart finds himself in. Her lengthy recollection of a recent date gone wrong gone right gone wrong again is a potential momentum-killer that's instead as transfixing as Virginia Madsen's soliloquy about wine and grapes in Sideways, and it feels right that the movie, like Hart's nattering, should take a break from its lead's chatterbox tendencies in that moment and simply listen. I love love love Blue Moon, and it feels like an embarrassment of riches that we get another Linklater – the Breathless biopic Nouvelle Vague – opening in Iowa City in just four days, and streaming on Netflix starting November 14. That almost makes up for the director, an evident Sondheim acolyte, deciding to take a real-time 20 years to shoot the composer's musical Merrily We Roll Along, a showcase for Paul Mescal, Beanie Feldstein, and Ben Platt that isn't due for release until 2040. Again: That almost makes up for the delay. Some of us are getting up there, dammit.
